My Beautiful Sister

My big sis Emily Jane is a painter. She's opening an exhibit on First Thursday at Urban Wine Works in Portland, Oregon. All the paintings are from her recent 6-month visit back to the Midewest where we grew up.

She's a talented lady. Oregonians, do stop by! Tell her I sent you.

Urban Wine Works
407 NW 16th Ave.
March 2, 2006
5:30 to 8:30 PM
More Info

This is My Uvula

Lesson

autotelism
n : belief that a work of art is an end in itself or its own justification

An exercise in procrastination

Especially for the Voix, per request.

1. What time is it? 9:12 pm
2. What is your Full name: Mary Katherine Blah blah blah
3. What are you most afraid of: Dig right into the big questions, eh? On the Big Scale: World War. On the day-to-day scale, harm to my family (and I consider many friends family).
4. What is the most recent movie that you've seen in a theatre: Uhhhh… The Fastest Indian. Nice flick.
5. Have you ever seen a ghost? Nope, but I’ve always kinda wanted to.
6. Where were you born? rural Indiana.
7. Favourite food? Thai red curry with veggies and fresh tofu. If your nose ain’t runnin’ by the second bite, it isn’t hot enough.8. Ever been to Alaska: Nope
9. Ever been toilet paper rolling: No, but I have put toothpaste under a couple car door handles.
10. Loved someone so much it made you cry? Of course.
11. Been in a car accident: Nothing major.
12. Croutons or bacon bits: Croutons
13. Favourite day of the week: Sunday
14. Favourite Restaurant: Bai Tong in Portland. Or… oh, what’s it called? That great Thai place on SW Hawthorne and 45th or so…
15. Favourite Flower: Cala Lily. My friend Matty sent me two big bunches for V-day.
16. Favourite sport to watch: Rugby. Go Wallabies!!!
17. Favourite Drink: London Fizz.
18 Favourite ice cream: B&J’s coffee toffee
19. Disney or Warner Brothers: Warner Brothers. I once owned Pinky and the Brain underwear.
20. Favourite fast food restaurant : Huh? Does Escape from New York pizza count?
21. How many times you failed your driver's test? None.
22. Before this one, from whom did you get your last email: Australian Dan.
23 . What do you do most often when you are bored: E-mail. Eat.
24. Bedtime: 11
25. Who will respond to this e-mail the quickest: Voix, Brian, Julie, Jessi and Zetta are about the only ones who ever post comments, so….
26. Who is the person you sent this to that is least likely to respond? Who cares?
28. Who is the person that you are most curious to see their responses??? Oh, anyone, I guess.
29. Favourite TV shows: Jeopardy
30. Ford or Chevy: Schwinn
31 What are you listening to right now: Lyle Lovett
32. What are your favourite colours: Today, sky blue.
33. How many tattoos do you have? Zero
34. How many pets do you have? The Bird (my cat) lives with his Uncle Matt in P-town.
35. Which came first the chicken or the egg? The burbling mass of oceanic jelly.
36. What would you like to accomplish before you die? Really, the whole point of incarnation is love, growth and helping each other. [Cue sappy music here, but it’s true.] We’re more one unit here than we realize, so I’d have to say I want to touch lives for the better and ease suffering somehow. Maybe it’ll be by contributing something artistic, or through relationships, I don’t know.

Pineapple Cake in the Oven

I have a job interview tomorrow from 10-12.

You know how when you're looking for an apartment or, lets say you're trying online dating, sometimes it's not what you hope. (Digression: What's up with my second person thing these days? Brian, have I driven you insane yet?) You see the ad, talk about it and kinda get exited and hope that it's all as good as it appears to be. Then you go and check it out in person. Sometimes it's exactly as awesome as it sounds, like my old job at the winery, my current attic apartment, Jon the baseball player whose online photo does his rock-solid abs no justice. Most of the time it blows chunks, like my evil-lawyer job, infomercial products (Avoid the leg-waxers, ladies. And gentlemen.) and the blind date I went on where the guy had a mustache and wore a t-shirt that said "Co-ed naked firefighting: Find 'em hot and leave 'em wet."

I really hope this job is as good as it sounds. And that they love me as much as they should, of course.

Say a prayer for me, some love, cross your fingers, consult Buddha or send me vibes or chi or whatever version of holy goodness is that you dig.

I do not want to do homework today.

Twilight Zone

I'd like to inform you that the Mall of America is a vortex of evil. It takes non-materialistic souls like myself, sucks you in and before you know it you're in some dressing room with a massive pile of cool stuff you can’t afford. You go in for one thing—a nice, affordable outfit for a job interview. You go on a Monday because you hate throngs of stupid people. You aren’t overly fond of shopping in the first place.

MOA may pump sanity-altering chemicals through the vents. Your eyes glaze over like those folks hunched over the slot machines all night in Vegas. Before you know it, you’re stumbling around with 50 pounds of shopping bags muttering "I can't carry anything else... but there's H&M... and that cool place I've never heard of... and the sale at Bloomies. I thought Anne Taylor was just around this corner, but it’s a whole wing of more, more more stuff…" Since when do you wear Anne Taylor? Since when do you use words like "Bloomies?" Never. Now you’re plopped down in front of the giant roller coaster made out of Legos or whatever sipping an Orange Julius to refuel.

Rather like the Bermuda triangle, you go in prepared to get what you need and get out quick, but all your money somehow disappears and you're lucky if you get out alive. Beware, that’s all I’m saying.

A Love Letter to Saddam Hussein

A hunger strike? Are you KIDDING me? Why are they feeding you in the first place? The world is full of starving homeless people and you’re on a hunger strike? You're getting food and clothing and shelter? OH MY GOD this is one messed up planet we live on. Saddam, clawing for the last bit of power… There is nothing left, Saddam. Nothing left. You will never last. I’d like just 5 minutes alone with you to scream in your face. Okay, maybe not alone. Maybe we could get a guard in there or something, or maybe I could be okay screaming, SCREAMING at you through some metal prison bars. Oh, I would so let you have it. Starving yourself. Go for it. Go for it. You are not worthy of an ounce of pitty or aid this world has to offer.

Eye of a Hurricane, Listen to Yourself Churn

I lived with Emily and Patrick in a grubby apartment complex next to an alligator infested pond in South Carolina. It was during hurricane Felix. The rain came in sideways and just about drilled holes through your shirt. The alligator floated on its belly all day long, its stubby arms and legs spread out. We saw it travel from end to end all day from our living room window.

Emily was sick. Patrick called me at the restaurant and told me to come home. She couldn’t keep down applesauce. She couldn’t keep down anything.

I stunk like French fries and ranch dressing. The wind threw the door open and I kicked off my shoes and my keys slid across the counter and crashed against the kitchen wall. “Emmy, Em are you okay?” She was awake with a fever and a trash can of vomited up water.

She was in the hospital for 5 days a week ago. They thought it was food poisoning. They couldn’t find anything else wrong. This wasn’t food poisoning. I was 18. I had driven the two hours to the hospital after work and then back to work in the morning for the 5 days she was admitted. They sent her home because she was fine. Now, a week later, she is not fine again. I called the man who had been her doctor before. It was 4 a.m.

“Bring her in at 8 AM. Leave home with her at 6.” The phone rang at 4:15. It was the doctor again. “I changed my mind. Bring her in now.”

She was curled on the back seat. The traffic lights swung precariously from their threads above. Stop signs quivered and the rain and wind were smashing. What do you do? She didn’t move. I had a tape of REM’s “It’s the end of the world as we know it.” I played the first 5 seconds and rewound it until I memorized it:

That's great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane -Lenny Bruce is not afraid. Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn -world serves its own needs, don't misserve your own needs.

Then played the next 5 seconds until I memorized it, then the next until I got to the hospital. It was all hurry and fury and take the corners slow so it doesn’t hurt her and the wipers going at high speed, keep that glass clean! and then it was into the hospital where they whisked her away from me then it was me sitting alone in a plastic covered chair with a Styrofoam cup and silence and more silence and the buzz of fluorescent lights and I am alone. Alone. Alone for a long time. Then the lady tells me to come in here and sit down at this desk and fill out this stuff and I filled it out. Is the pregnant? No. Is she allergic to anything? Does she smoke? How much does she drink? And I had some questions, like Where did you take her? Why didn’t you figure this out the first fucking time? Where are our parents? What are you doing to her? Are you going to save her life or not? What is wrong with her? How will I ever survive if she dies? Why didn’t I do something sooner?

The doctor came in and told me they didn’t know. They didn’t know what was wrong but there is a mass in her abdomen. For a second I thought Mass? The Pope and candles and Glory Glory Hallelujah and smoke? I hadn’t slept all night. I still had on my orange-tinted panty hose and waitress apron. What do you mean mass? I uncrossed and recrossed my legs, and the change in the apron jingled.

I mean, there’s something in there and we can’t figure out what it is, so we’re going to do surgery. We don’t know what we’re going to do in there. We have to look inside to see what’s wrong, then we’ll fix it. If we can. And we’ll know more then.

I’m calling our parents. They can be here in 18 hours.

We’re taking her to surgery now. Are you a legal adult? You’ll have to sign here.

I paused and thought, “I’m signing a piece of paper so this doctor can slice my sister open and do something, we don’t know what, to an unidentifiable mass in her abdomen.” The doctor said, “If we’d have had any idea how bad this was, we wouldn’t have had you drive her. We’d have sent a helicopter to pick her up.

I signed it.

Teaching Poetry to Refugees

We go slowly. We get good at waiting and listening.

We repeat.

Last night we talked about metaphor. We read a poem where a man compares himself to a tiger. The tiger lives in the woods and stalks animals, kills them and drags them to its young. The man, because of the war, escaped to the woods, stalked animals, killed them and dragged them to his children. I am you, tiger. I am animal.

Can't we just write stories? Why didn't he just say "The war is bad. I hunt rats."

Lets think of a metaphor for winter. Homelessness, they said, winter is the inside of a dark cave. They wrote a poem about what they like and don't like. They wrote I Hate Metaphor.

We had a talk about why poetry is art, and why it is more powerful to use a comparison to express a feeling. The poem isn't just about acting like a tiger, hunting for rodents in the woods. It is about being reduced to a primal level, being treated like an animal, watching your babies starve. It's about oppression. War. Desperation. Writers use poems and comparison to tell stories that aren't just about a man in the woods in Laos. There is more there. Do you see now that there is more?

A man from Sudan said Yes, I know how this man feels. I have felt that. It is same. All over the world war feels same. Learners nod at each other--they're from 8 countries and 4 continents all together--then look back up to me with a respectful You don't know. They're right--I don't.

In the end, they put on coats and gloves and walk to catch busses and go to work at the stop sign factory and day care center and tall office buildings where they dump trash and sweep coffee grounds in the middle of the night. They go off to do their homework, to underline words for me to define next week for them: What is distance? What is glow? What is this: has made all the difference?

Did anyone understand? I get in my car and drive home with a stack of I Hate Metaphor poems and think next week, I will try something else. When I return to the stack, there is this:

A Poem by Wang Chue Xiong, Hmong freedom fighter living in Saint Paul, Minnesota:

Catch a dove
to lock in the cage
It lonesome (lonely)
endure suffering, It
live in the cage is a
silver cage, gold cage.
but a dove doesn't forget
the wood (tree).

same as me. moved to live
in the propress country.
I'm lonesome (lonely) and
endure suffering. live in a
big house, big apartment many
floor, but I don't forget my
homecountry, don't forget my
native language, don't forget
ricefield, fence and garden,
don't forget my cousins, my
friends, my Hmong people that
risk in fighting to protect
themself, from killing and
destroy by communist vietnam
and lao communist military
power, and they still fighting
untilnow.

We may lose and we may win, but we will never be here again.

Snowhills are good for fort building, tunnel digging, and hiding behind fortresses and nailing your sister in the mouth with a butt load of snow from close range. They are good for saucer sledding. They are not good for shoving matches. They are not good for coming over from another neighborhood, acting like you own the place, especially if your name is Megan and no one likes you anyway.

Bossing people around on their snow hill and announcing to me that Santa Clause doesn’t exist will result in a verbal assault by my older sister, Emily. If you insist that Santa is a big fat lie, you will be shoved by Emily and told repeatedly to Shut Up. It is not recommended that you shove her back and cause her to tumble down said hill and split her lip open on the Telephone Company’s parking lot asphalt.

It is hard to run 5 blocks to your father’s hardware store in Moon Boots. Nineteen-year-old, probably high, bicycle mechanics named Tim do not like being the only adult around on such occasions, and they do not like calling the neighbor girl to baby-sit you while he takes your older sister, who is bleeding down her chin and throat and onto her shiny yellow snowsuit, to the emergency room. Tim does not like that the reason your father was not at the store is because he was in the house right next to the scene of the incident, but happened to be untangling Christmas lights in the attic and not hear the commotion.

Tim will hold her hand through three stitches, and your dad will leave you with the neighbor, walk to the hospital and carry her home. Later, he will feed you hotdog pizza, toss you both into the bathtub and play the Entertainer on the piano while you splash around because it’s Emily’s favorite and she’s had a rough day.

When you’re choosing pajamas (you father’s t-shirts, that come down to your knees), you will let Emily wear the Eagles one from the 1978 concert Dad went to at Comisky Park in Chicago, because that is the most coveted nightgown of all.

Your sister doesn’t need to know that you already knew there wasn’t a Santa Clause, but she does need to know that when she needs a warm, comfy Thank You, you will provide it in the form of your favorite shirt that lists “Witchy Woman” as song number 10 on the play list, right under a picture of a giant Eagle, wings spread wide.

What to toss. What to keep.

I was driving down Hennepin at the ungodly hour of 7 a.m. praying that the needle on my—what do you call that?—thermostat on my car would go down. It creeped up slowly from Franklin to Lagoon, paused right before the red, then started coming back down.

There was a guy on the radio who may have been some evangelical preacher of some kind giving advice to people. Not so much a preacher as some kind of psychic who could apparently heal through the airwaves.

“Janice, Janice, Janice!” he said. “You have a block like a river dam. You’re attracting creeps into your life because you’re still in love with someone else! You’ll never move on until you let go, Janice. This man you love? It’s never going to happen. I’m here to help you.”

“Really?” Janice said. “Oh, how did you know!”

There was a pause.

“There. Feel that? Did you feel that Janice? A tingling sensation throughout your body?”

“Yes!” Janice said, “Not really a tingling, though, more like my hands got hot.”

“That’s it,” he said. “Just like that I tore down that block and you have let go. You’re free to move on. I see you starting a romance with someone within the next month. Someone who is in your life right now who you haven’t ever noticed before. You two will be happy together.”

The guy went on like this—proclaiming the truth of people’s problems and tearing down blocks and predicting all the good things that would happen to them now that their internal alleys are free and clear. The DJ occasionally interrupted to tell us how jammed the phone lines were.

So last night I was driving to a gathering in another town. It happens to be very close to the house of someone I dated. He’s probably the only guy I’d actually throw a drink in the face of, or perhaps punch in the eye, if I saw him today. Every other time I’d driven this route was full of happiness and comfort because I drove it to see him. Driving it now, my anxiety level now increased in some sort of Pavlovian way.

Oh, it all came back—the automatic way I turned here and there. Then, the mental movie reel of The Scene of Disaster wheeled out from its corner and started to play in my mind. I stopped it—the playback—because now I have the ability to intercept the thoughts. I wished some nice evangelical psychic nutjob would come and blow the movie reel downstream with a power washer and make my head tingle and tell me that now that the dam has been broken up and swept away. All will be clear and the future will only be good. That sounds nice. But it doesn’t work that way.

Frankly, I want to hang onto some of the Bad Experience river dam. I've already hacked through most of it, and unless you practically drop me in front of his house, I'm in a great place. We've all go them. Parent stuff, relationship stuff, friend stuff, our own stuff. Yes, Old Stuff hurts, but it also does us some good: If a caveman goes into a cave and gets munched on by a tiger, chances are he’ll learn something about what caves not to go into ever again. So: Do we need the bad things to entirely go away? Is remembering and reliving and “working through” them all the best way to do that?

It leaves a lot of questions about what stays on our minds—what to let go and what to hang on to. And how, how, how, unless we enlist the help of Evangelical Guy, do we let go of what needs releasing ourselves? Is it deliberate? A choice? Something that happens naturally over time? Can we help it happen faster? That’s what I’d like to know.